Nikolai Gubenko was born in Odessa catacombs in 1941. When the boy was just a year old, his mother was hanged for refusing to cooperate with the German occupiers. He spent his childhood in the orphanage, where few people believed in acting talent Gubenko, but he in spite of everything managed to come to VGIK. And then he really was lucky to get on one of the most star-studded as then say, courses. His classmates was Sergei Nikonenko, Lydia Fedoseyev-Shukshin, Larissa Luzhina, Evgeniy Zharikov, Zhanna Bolotova, who became his wife.
a talented artist, drew the attention of Yuri Lyubimov and Marlen Khutsiev. In 1964 he held double triumph – the role of pilot Yang Suna in the play “the Good person of Szechwan” at the Taganka Theater and one of the leading roles in the movie “I am 20 years old”. More were successful directorial experiences – “a soldier Came from the front,” written by Vasily Shukshin and “life of leisure”. No less loud acting – Sitnikov in the “Noble nest” by Andrei Konchalovsky or Lieutenant Goloskov in “They fought for the Motherland” by Sergei Bondarchuk.
In 1989, Nikolai Gubenko all of a sudden took the post of Minister of culture. It will contribute to the return of Yuri Lyubimov in Russia and in his home theater on Taganka. But here’s the irony, it will be the beginning of a dramatic split of the legendary theatre actor will remain with Lyubimov and others will go along with Gubenko in the theater “Commonwealth Taganka actors”. Theatre Gubenko led until the last day. Leaving politics because I believe she could do something useful.
In memory of Nikolay Gubenko we have collected a few quotations from his speeches and interviews.
About the theater
“the Theatre life of the city. Nor day nor night can’t stop thinking about the theatre. Night dream about him, in the morning faced with the reality, and every time this problem is not only a creative order, and way of life, wages, housing, illness, a funeral, a huge complex of problems of the camp, which gathered it is not known how”.
About the movie
“more like a Movie theater. Because in some way I’m the slowpoke, then a relatively long time thinking about the search intent of the film. It is necessary to nurture and enrich content. To do this, I traveled around the country, recorded the dialogues kilometers, resulting in the born topic. Then write the script. Four years of thinking and searching, full of loneliness, and then eight or nine months of production – time family. We implemented the idea – and the family was broken up”.
About the country
“I am not a historian, not a philosopher, and a man born in 1941, in the catacombs. The war deprived me of parents and the state called the Soviet Union assumed the obligations to 19 million orphaned children, including me. Anything other than gratitudeness of the country, of course, awareness of errors, which are inevitable for every building, I do not feel. I’m not a rabid fan of the ideology of communism, as some of my colleagues, but rabid fan of justice.”
